This robot is beginning to replace housekeepers in hotels and guests are having some interesting reactions

A
Nao humanoid robot by Aldebaran Robotics dances to the Chinese
song "Little Apple" at the World Robot Exhibition during the 2015
World Robot Conference in Beijing, China.Jason Lee/Reuters

Kids do the darndest things. These days, they tend
to treat robots like humans.

That's according to Tessa Lau, who works as the Chief Robot
Whisperer at Savioke, a California-based robotics company working
on autonomous helpers for the service and hospitality
industry.

On stage at the Bloomberg Technology Conference in San Francisco
on Tuesday, Lau said the most surprising interactions she's
witnessed between the company's bots and humans have involved
younger hotel guests.

"Kids follow robots like a pied piper. Every time the kids see
the robot, they hug it, grab it, dance around it," she
says. "It's part of their family."

Savioke robots looks like
glittering garbage cans on wheels. They've made 30,000
deliveries to hotel guests to date, and traveled 870
miles all on their own.

Savioke

"During that time we learned a lot about how people treat
robots," Lau says. "They're out there 24-7 in our hotels
interacting with guests."

Say the robot drops off a couple Starbucks bottled coffee drinks
to a family's hotel room. Lau says children will often follow the
robot from the door to the elevator and wave goodbye.

While adults may look to robots as machines that will take away
their jobs or conquer the world, children approach them with an
open mind. These interactions have long been of interest to
researchers.

A
hotel guests accepts a delivery from a Savioke Relay
robot.Savioke

A 2010 study out of University of Washington's
Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences suggests children as
young as 18 months
acknowledge robots as living, thinking beings. When
babies watched humanoid robots answer a researcher's questions,
the babies had a tendency to follow the robot's gaze,
implying they thought the robots were sentient.

Andrew Meltzoff, a psychology professor at the University
of Washington,
tells The Atlantic babies learn from observation and
imitation. A Savioke robot that performs a task like room service
delivery as well as a hotel employee does it can seem
human.

"They see another person and register that the person is
'Like Me,'" Metlzoff says. "They devote great attention to the
'Like Me' entities in the world. Roboticists have a lot to learn
from babies."